I moved to Kingston from Peterborough, where I had lived for four years to attend Trent University. At the end of that stage of my academic development, the piece of paper that will be handed to be at convocation next week will read something like "Joint bachelor of science in geography and biology with a minor in international development studies". Based on the high marks I earned from all the long hours and hard work I put in, I will be on the President's roll. I've been told that will be receive a couple awards too. I will congratulate my peers. I will shake hands with my professors. They will wish me luck in my future endeavours, but my future has already started!

Kingston will be my home for the next couple of years as I complete a master's of science in geography. Officially I start this autumn, but I received a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) award that ​is allowing me to get a jump start on my research and data collection.

​So far I have been doing a literature review with a handful of field days. This week I was testing field equipment in advance of my field season later this summer. Best to make sure everything works now instead of finding it out when you need it in the field.​

Testing a couple GPS units led me to a trail through a wetland and onto Cow Island at the Queen's University Biological Station. It was a path I was happy to follow!

After a bit of a hiatus to get adjusted to a new routine in a new place, I am excited to continue to share my flora finds and other outdoor adventuring with you all! That said, the range of my explorations has expanded and shifted beyond the Peterborough area, so now the name PTBO Flora seems limiting. I have been thinking about how best to reimagine this site to make it more reflective of my new scope of exploration.

While the calendar says January 1st is "officially" the first day of the new year, I am not quite convinced! I had always associated spring with the new year.

It is a time of new growth. Colour returns to the landscape as the snow melts and is replaced by vivid green grass and flashes of bright wildflowers. It is a time of awakening. Trees dust the snow off their limbs as they wake up to reach to the sky and unfurl their leaves to catch the warming sun. It is a time of activity. Animals return from their winter homes to the south, those that stayed are energized by the excitement and anticipation for a new season. It is a time of promise and potential. New ideas are formed, new friends are made, and new adventures are had.

PTBO Flora was born as a passion project of founder Rachel in the summer of 2015. Originally called The Peterborough Flora Compendium, our intent at inception was to create an online catalogue of wildflower species in and around Peterborough. We have since expanded and our current name PTBO Flora reflects the broader range of content, services, and products we now offer.

Being able to provide the quality and quantity of content that we strive for requires a lot of time and hard work - both of which we are committed to - but it also requires financial support. Something that we are increasingly in need of as we have long since outgrown our humble roots as Rachel's passion project! Your contribution helps finance website and podcast hosting, as well as project, equipment and other operational costs. You can support PTBO Flora by subscribing to a membership, by making a pledge on Patreon, or by purchasing our limited edition framed prints.

​As a way to give thanks to our members, we are committed to delivering exclusive content and other perks. The compendium has become a cornerstone of our membership program, we also offer downloadable field guides, and our members are able to submit their questions for our podcast guests.

Thank you to everyone that supporting our recent campaign to produce Plan Portraits, a colouring book of local flora finds, and who shared and liked the link on social media. It was our first ever Kickstarter campaign, and while we did not meet our target, we certainly learned a lot!

We also want to provide an update on this project, because I know a lot of people were excited about the idea. While we will not be able to publish any colouring books at this time (unfortunately the overhead is too much for a teeny business like us to bear!), we are not abandoning the idea!

Over the coming weeks we will be preparing a digital version that will include a limited selection of illustrations that can be downloaded, printed and coloured. This will be free and available exclusively to PTBO Flora members. So, if you have not yet subscribed to our membership, we recommend that you become a member today (plus, it is also the perfect time to prep for spring and spruce up on your plant identification skills).​

As this is the last post in my "best of 2016" series I am going to tell a bit of a different story. This is still a story about finding one of my fave wildflowers for the first time, but it is also tied into the story of how PTBO Flora was born.

Sometimes my first encounter with a wildflower is not in the field, but online. Before developing PTBO Flora, I had started to feature wildflowers on my personal Instagram feed. When I moved to Peterborough from Toronto I was, quite frankly, bored and felt isolated. Like any newcomer, I didn't know anyone in Peterborough, and while I knew about the great parks in or near the city I didn't drive. Living in large cities I had never needed a car, so I never got a licence. But I found that cycling and taking the bus can only take you so far in Peterborough. Eventually I met some amazing people, including my partner who I later moved in with. As amazing as it was to start a life together, when he wasn't home again I found myself isolated and bored in our north end home. I had always lived downtown, even in Peterborough, where everything was nearby - from shops to restaurants to entertainment to friends and more. Now I found myself, basically, in the suburbs. And I was starting to get cabin fever.

Fortunately my suburb has a park. I started visiting it nearly every single day, sometimes more than once, watching the wildflowers come and go over the course of the seasons. While I had spent a decade living in large metropolises, growing up in a smaller city in southern Ontario I had spent a lot of time adventuring in nature with my very outdoorsy parents. Serendipitously, moving to the the suburb rekindled my relationship with nature. Perhaps predictably, wildflowers eventually took over my Instagram feed entirely!

My partner encouraged me to do something more with all the wildflower specimens I had observed, something more than just posting on Instagram. And so, I began work on a compendium of local flora while also continuing to share my flora finds to Instagram and seeing what fellow flora enthusiasts were sharing. My boredom and isolation was replaced by wildflower and an amazing online community of fellow flora appreciators.

And that is how I first saw a curious blue bloom - with its flowers that never opened - on Instagram. Knowing that it had been found locally, I excitedly asked the person who had posted a photo of the flowers where they had stumbled upon a patch of these blue beauties.

During the week I tend to visit parks in the city of Peterborough, but on the weekend I like to venture further and explore other areas. Peterborough is posited as the gateway to the Kawarthas in tourism brochures, and there is certainly a lot to see outside of the city. But sometimes I have found that I didn't need to travel at all to find what I had been seeking.

The morning began by driving north of the city into the Canadian shield. I had spotted two stops I wanted to make on a prior drive along Northeys Bay Road (Woodview, ON): Eel's Creek and Quarry Bay Beach. Eel's Creek was the first stop. Upon my arrival I spotted something across the creek. It would have been impossible to miss the very bright red blooms that glowed in the sunlight. I had an inkling I knew what it was, but wanted to get a closer look at the wildflowers. I was, however, hesitant to walk across the slippery rock bed of Eel's Creek for fear I would slip and submerge my camera. Standing thigh deep in the creek, I took a photo of the greenery across the water where the fiery red flower stood, and left a tad disappointed.

Later that day it was brought to my attention that I could get up close to this wildflower somewhere else - right in downtown Peterborough in the Otonabee River near Rotary Park! I could scarce stay at home another second and was off again. Sure enough, the banks of the Otonabee were dotted with hundreds of right red blooms. So, first I saw Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) from afar at Eel's Creek, and later the same day much closer at Rotary Park.

When I am out botanizing I deliberately slow my pace, often coming to a complete stop, to look around. Simply put, the slower I go the more I see. Sometimes more means larger quantities, other times it means finer details.

Despite being noted in one of my trusted guide books as commonplace and widespread, the diminutive enchanter's nighshade (Circaea lutetiana) had eluded me. The delicate plant immediately intrigued me, and my readings made me all the more pleased with my find. I adore plant folklore, and this plant has one of my favourite backstories.

The genus (Circaea) received its name from Circe, an enchantress in Homer's epic The Odyssey. As the story goes, Circe invited the crew from the hero Odysseus's ship to her home for a feast. The feast's food and wine were laced with this plant and used to transform the crew into pigs.

Moving to Peterborough was a big decision. I had never been here before and knew nobody. I was nervous and approached the decision with a mixture of optimism and caution. The weeks leading up to my move I researched the city and surrounding areas. One place that caught my eye immediately (and that I mentally flagged as "I want to go to there") was Petroglyphs Provincial Park.

It took me nearly three years of living here, but I finally made it to the park!

Petroglyphs Provincial Park is about 45 minutes away from Peterborough (depending on where you're coming from), just north of the shores of Stoney Lake. And it's a beautiful drive as you enter the Canadian shield. It is also quite close to Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park (yet another on my list of parks to visit - hopefully sometime this year). Once you reach Petroglyphs Provincial Park, you turn off the main road onto a gravel road through the woods that must go for a good few kilometres before you reach the visitor's centre. There you are able to walk through a display and watch a short documentary called "The Teaching Rocks" (both of which I recommend doing). The petroglyphs, which are the largest concentration in Canada, are in a second building meant to minimize erosion of the site. It is considered a sacred place. The carvings are believed to have been made by Algonquin people between 900 and 1100. They depict people, animals and culture and are known as Kinomagewapkong, or the teaching rocks, as the elders would use them to teach select younger individuals. I am not a religious person, but I am fascinated by the stories people have used to try to understand and make sense of their world. As I stood there I tried to etch the experience, my thoughts and feelings as I stood over the rocks in my mind to hold onto them for as long as I can.

The petroglyphs are not all that is said to be sacred, the entire site is. The crevasses in the rocks were said to lead to the spirit world. The geology and glacial history of this place have created unique features, carving the rocks and the landscape as a whole on a larger scale.

As for the flora, despite being relatively near to Peterborough, the surficial geology, forest age, tree types, among other factors, are different enough from Peterborough so that the composition of wildflowers differs. Among the many wildflowers at Petroglyphs Provincial Park, I was most excited to see poke milkweed (Asclepias exaltata) for the very first time.

It's a smaller park with a lot of packed into it. It has a forest, old agricultural fields, wetlands, a pond, and a stream. Aside from the hundreds of wildflower species I have identified at this park I have also made some great fauna sightings. Among these sighting are a number of bird species like wild turkeys, pileated woodpeckers, wood ducks, hummingbirds, and owls, as well as mammals like coyotes, and deer.

I also like that it's close to my house. This allows me to visit the park on a near daily basis and see the comings and goings of different wildflower species. As I visit this park so frequently I have a sense that I am less overwhelmed by its sights and sounds. Instead of everything being new, most things are familiar and new things stand out.

A pop of blue afar in a field of green may be easy to miss - and I very nearly did miss it - but the blue was new in the field. As I approached the small patch of blue blooms I realized I was seeing some new species of flower for the first time, and that something new was flax (Linum usitatissimum).